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OK. So, if you set yourself an XHTML doctype, your page validates. And you can put a pretty badge on your page. Is there a practical gain? Or the validation solely for your own artistic delight? Or worse, is it just an ego-boost?

Originally Posted by Mr Initial Man

Proof positive that HTML5 ain't no good. *Nod.*

Proof positive of nothing. If you want "proof" of something, refer to the dot-com giants of notoriety and success, all of which are using the HTML5 doctype. (And apparently jquery!)

Proof positive of nothing. If you want "proof" of something, refer to the dot-com giants of notoriety and success, all of which are using the HTML5 doctype. (And apparently jquery!)

Dude, it's called a JOKE. I'd suggest where that "stick" in "Stickman" might be, but let's keep this civil.

Originally Posted by svidgen

OK. So, if you set yourself an XHTML doctype, your page validates. And you can put a pretty badge on your page. Is there a practical gain? Or the validation solely for your own artistic delight? Or worse, is it just an ego-boost?

Actually there IS practical gain in earning that pretty badge: if I have to publish this book myself, I will do so on CD as a series of webpages, which means people might actually LOOK at my code. If I've made sure that this validates as XHTML 1.0, I've made sure I haven't left out any end tags and curious readers won't be looking at slop.

Before actually publishing on CD, I might switch it back over to HTML 4.01--that's what I used when I started, but I kept leaving out end tags, and the validator didn't pick that up. XHTML 1.0 was not as forgiving, which helped.

And yes, I AM going to be picky. After a course in COBOL where some of the examples had ERRORS IN THEM (* snarl, snap, gripe *) I am going to be picky and teach the best coding practices I can, and DEMOSTRATE them when someone looks at my code and make darned SURE that my pages have no errors.

*Takes calming drink of coffee.*

That, and it lets me use the W3C validation badges if I need to demonstrate an image.

It's certainly true that the HTML5 spec is not fully backward compatible with the HTML4 spec. HTML5 removed some elements and attributes that went unused. Those same attributes in your XHTML document, though valid, are ignored by the browser, and so don't really serve any purpose.

It's also worth noting that the browsers don't care what version of HTML you declare in your doctype. Whether HTML4, XHTML, or HTML5, the browsers will parse your page the same way, which is why developers today are generally opting for the shorter and simpler HTML5 doctype.

I personally wouldn't use the tag at all. But, if I was advising someone else on the use of the tag, I'd say "use the minimun required to produce the desired effect." Unless I misunderstand your use of the tag, it's solely an search engine informing tag. And for those purposes, I'd say you really just need rel and href: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...d-relprev.html

Dude, it's called a JOKE. I'd suggest where that "stick" in "Stickman" might be, but let's keep this civil.

Actually there IS practical gain in earning that pretty badge: if I have to publish this book myself, I will do so on CD as a series of webpages, which means people might actually LOOK at my code. If I've made sure that this validates as XHTML 1.0, I've made sure I haven't left out any end tags and curious readers won't be looking at slop.

Before actually publishing on CD, I might switch it back over to HTML 4.01--that's what I used when I started, but I kept leaving out end tags, and the validator didn't pick that up. XHTML 1.0 was not as forgiving, which helped.

And yes, I AM going to be picky. After a course in COBOL where some of the examples had ERRORS IN THEM (* snarl, snap, gripe *) I am going to be picky and teach the best coding practices I can, and DEMOSTRATE them when someone looks at my code and make darned SURE that my pages have no errors.

*Takes calming drink of coffee.*

That, and it lets me use the W3C validation badges if I need to demonstrate an image.

Probably the most important thing I can advise here is, don't write a book to teach old and dying standards. Write a book to teach up and coming standards, unless you're looking to donate your first revision to goodwill right way.

ADDENDUM: Oh, and don't misrepresent the value of the standards. You'll create a fleet of developers who limit their ability to create and their efficiency in doing so on account of their obsessions with fairly meaningless standards.

Sorry, I had hoped that my statement about HTML5 being no good was SO ridiculous that everyone here would dismiss it as silliness.

Originally Posted by svidgen

I personally wouldn't use the tag at all. But, if I was advising someone else on the use of the tag, I'd say "use the minimun required to produce the desired effect." Unless I misunderstand your use of the tag, it's solely an search engine informing tag. And for those purposes, I'd say you really just need rel and href: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...d-relprev.html

It's also used for a PHP program that I used to create the book's outline AND I love how Opera handles those elements (Mouse gestures = yes, please).

Hmmm... apparently, you CAN get away with omitting the "type" attribute in XHTML...

Originally Posted by svidgen

Probably the most important thing I can advise here is, don't write a book to teach old and dying standards. Write a book to teach up and coming standards, unless you're looking to donate your first revision to goodwill right way.

Old and dying or actually stable? I'm sorry, I'm a tad leery of a language whose finalization is so far away that it end up like ElementML 2.6491203-B by the time it's all done.

Originally Posted by svidgen

ADDENDUM: Oh, and don't misrepresent the value of the standards. You'll create a fleet of developers who limit their ability to create and their efficiency in doing so on account of their obsessions with fairly meaningless standards.

All right, so which attributes would YOU trim out of the following element...

The "rev" attribute, I believe, doesn't serve any practical purpose.

The "type" attribute seems to still be valid in HTML5, but I believe it's largely useless, especially when the type is HTML. According to the HTML4 spec, the "type" attribute gives browsers the option to skip fetching the content if the browser doesn't support that content's type. But since every browser supports HTML.....

The charset is determined from the HTTP response. I believe this attribute is largely ignored.

Ditto "hreflang".

I'm not at all sure what the "class" is supposed to accomplish.

I don't know of any browser or even screen reader that will render the "title"'s advisory information.

And to boot, it seems that the whole tag -- a "prev" link -- is ignored altogether. "next" links give the browser the option to preload the next page, but "prev" links don't seem to do anything at all.

I don't think anyone ever said your code was invalid. What we've been trying to convey is that an awful lot of those attributes are ignored by browsers, and so serve no practical purpose. And largely for that reason, several of those attributes have been removed in HTML5.

This may be another case where I'm misunderstanding your humor... but in that article, are you arguing in favor of presentational markup?

Essentially I was--specifically, really short, handy tags like <i> that I used when <em>, <cite>, etc. really didn't semantically fit. This was done way back when XHTML 2.0 was the big news of the day.

I don't think anyone ever said your code was invalid. What we've been trying to convey is that an awful lot of those attributes are ignored by browsers, and so serve no practical purpose. And largely for that reason, several of those attributes have been removed in HTML5.

I know, I just wanted to see just how bloated I could make a <link> element and still have it valid.